Thank you. I wrote a long post but then I decided not to post it... Always remember to view past "Tricks" from the era they were written in. Lookup tables, in

Thank you. I wrote a long post but then I decided not to post it... Always remember to view past "Tricks" from the era they were written in. Lookup tables, in the 90's, for example, were used EVERYWHERE. People always used for sin/cos/tan functions. Fixed-point math was very common as well. Nowadays, it may seem like "magic" but it's not. It was just "the way" to get things done. I'm not downplaying the skill of the programmers of those eras, it's just keep it in perspective. Many "tricks" weren't invented for that one game, they were common place for all programmers using those platforms. I used to use compiled sprites all the time in the 90's. They seem like magic today, but they were just another kind of drawing to us. In Allegro 4, you could even draw one by simply calling a "make compiled sprite" function and making sure to not draw it outside of the clipping rectangle (since they can't be clipped). That was it. You build it with a builder function, and then you call draw on it. But it "seems" insane nowadays to convert the bits of a bitmap into raw machine code that draws those bits to save some CPU cycles.